Chapter 17 #2
Hank’s house smelled like lemon polish and roast chicken and, underneath it, the faint chemical ghost of fresh paint, because the upstairs hall had gotten painted that afternoon whether the custody case required it or not.
Reno had come early to help and grabbed a quick shower in the bathroom after they finished painting. Now it was a quarter to six and the table was set for eight, and his niece was sitting on the bottom stair tying an ugly pair of tennis shoes that were the latest fad in teen shoe fashion..
Madison had her father’s dark coloring and her own opinions about everything, most of which she expressed with her eyebrows that were exactly like her father’s. And, like her father, she usually communicated with her eyebrows well before she bothered to involve words.
Her grandparents had dropped her that afternoon for the weekend, the first of what Hank was clearly praying in his quiet, white-knuckled way would become his daughter living here full time.
“You’re hovering,” Madison informed Reno without looking up from her laces.
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re hovering. Dad hovers standing still. You hover sitting down. It’s a family trait. A family flaw, really.”
“You nervous?” he asked.
“No.” The eyebrows came up. “Are you?”
“A little,” he admitted, because he’d learned a long time ago that the fastest way past a smart kid’s defenses was refusing to perform for her.
That got her to look up. “About what?”
“About whether you’re going to like Grace.”
Madison considered him unsettlingly like he would examine a witness at a deposition. “So she’s the reason.”
“The reason for what?”
“The reason you’re doing lawyer stuff again.
Grandpa Steele told Grandma you swore you’d never set foot in a courtroom again.
She told me, because Grandma tells me everything when she thinks I’m not a kid anymore, which is whenever she wants something repeated to Dad.
” Madison sat back. “Then all of a sudden you’re suing some lady six times. Obviously, Grace is the reason.”
He was actually pretty impressed by her logic and her observational skills. He commented, “You’d make a good lawyer if the field ever interests you.”
She smiled a little and looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Your dad asked me to help with your custody hearing,” he said. “That was the first legal proceeding I agreed to help with. So you’re actually the reason I dusted off my lawyer suit.” He paused. “But Grace is the reason I haven’t taken it off again.”
“Is she nice?” Madison asked. For one second she wasn’t fourteen going on thirty-five.
She was a kid who’d ridden a bus across the country, away from a mother who hadn’t come looking for her, and who was about to sit down at a table with strangers in a house she was being asked to call home, and who needed, very badly, for the people in it to be nice.
“She’s the nicest person I’ve ever met,” Reno said. “And she’s got a four-year-old daughter who’s going to love you so hard you’ll need to lie down afterward.”
Madison’s mouth twitched exactly the way Hank’s did. Steeles didn’t smile easily, but they all smiled the same way when they finally did.
A car turned into the drive. Headlights swept the front window.
Madison stood up. “How do I look?”
“Like trouble,” Reno said. “Which is perfect.”
Lily made it through the front door, took one look at Madison, and stopped dead.
“Are you the big girl?” Lily breathed. “You’re so pretty.”
Madison crouched down to her level, which Reno had not coached her to do and which told him most of what he needed to know about the kid Hank was fighting for. “I’m Madison. Are you Lily?”
“I’m a princess,” Lily corrected. Then, generously, “But also Lily.”
“Okay, Princess Lily. Do you know what I have in my backpack?”
“What?”
Madison reached into the bag at the foot of the stairs and produced a paperback so soft and bent at the corners it had clearly been read a hundred times. The cover showed a small bull sitting under a cork tree, smelling flowers.
Lily squealed at a pitch only dogs and velociraptors should be able to hear. “FERDINAND!”
“My favorite when I was little,” Madison said. “You want to read it after dinner?”
Lily looked up at Grace with her whole soul in her face. “Mommy. The big girl has Ferdinand.”
“I heard,” Grace said. Her voice wasn’t quite even.
Reno glanced at her and found her looking at Madison kneeling with her scarred book that she’d brought all the way across the country with her. Grace was blinking back suspicious brightness in her eyes.
Grace was carrying three pies in individual carriers, a fourth box was held flat against her chest like she was smuggling state secrets.
“Let me,” Reno said, reaching for the boxes.
“You can take the pies.” She turned her shoulder and kept the flat box out of his reach. “Not this one.”
“What’s that one?”
“That one,” Grace said, “is none of your business until dessert.”
Behind her, in the doorway, Tessa was wearing an expression he could only describe as a woman trying very hard to look like she wasn’t in on something. Dillon, beside her, was failing the same test worse.
Reno’s lawyer brain, which never fully turned off, flagged the inconsistency and set it on the pile with the face-down phone and the second grocery bag and the too innocent nope from Grace this morning.
He decided, for once in his life, not to cross-examine the witness. He took the pies and carried them to the kitchen.
Supper was loud and fun, the three brothers talking over each other while the women let them and the children ran the actual meeting.
Makayla, who at eleven considered Lily a delightful pet and future protégé, had brought her fiddle and was talked out of playing it at the table only by the combined diplomatic efforts of her mother and a dinner roll.
Lily sat between Madison and Grace and narrated. Reno sat across from Grace, where he could watch her, which he had arranged on purpose.
“So,” Hank said to Grace, in the tone of a man trying to sound casual in his own house and fooling no one, “Reno tells me your bakery’s the best in the valley.”
“Reno’s biased,” Grace said. “But he’s also right.”
“Madison.” Grace turned to her with the easy attention she gave everyone. “Your uncle says you like math.”
The eyebrows came up, braced for an adult being weird about a teenage girl liking math.
“I do,” Madison said, cautious. “And science. Chemistry.”
“Perfect! I’ve got a scaling problem that’s been stumping me for a year, and nobody in this town will help me with it because not a one of them is any good at math or science.”
Madison looked interested.
Grace leaned in. “I have a cookie recipe of my great-grandmother’s, and it only works in single batches.
The minute I double it or scale it up to commercial size, it goes flat and tough.
I’ve adjusted everything I know how to adjust. Leavening, fat, mixing time.
Nothing works. I think it’s a chemistry problem dressed up as a baking problem, and I think it would take somebody who likes math and knows some science to crack it. ”
Madison forgot, visibly, to be guarded. “Does it use it baking soda or baking powder?”
“Both.”
“Then it’s probably not linear,” Madison said, sitting up. “Acids and bases don’t double when you double everything else. The reaction does its own thing—” and she was off and running with explaining the science.
Grace nodded and asked real questions, and they ended up scribbling on one of the paper napkins. Hank caught Reno’s eye down the length of the table with an expression Reno had not seen on his brother’s face in years, which was undefended hope.
“Mr. Reno makes pancakes that stick to the ceiling,” Lily told Madison, during a lull.
“No way!” Madison said.
“He DID. And he scraped it down with a knife and the paint came off.”
Madison turned her eyebrows on Reno, delighted. “You ruined a ceiling with a pancake?”
“In my defense,” Reno said, “it was a very bad pancake.”
“He’s a famous lawyer,” Lily continued, on a roll now, “and he wears a crown at dinner, and he fixed our dock, and he calls Mommy babe, and —”
“Lily,” Grace said, in the serene voice of a woman whose face had gone the color of a ripe tomato.
“—and Loretta likes him, and Loretta doesn’t like anybody.”
“Who’s Loretta?” Madison asked.
“My donkey,” Tessa said.
“She has a job,” Lily declared.
“What’s her job?” Madison asked, looking genuinely entertained.
“Standing around looking like a donkey,” Lily, Tessa, and Dillon replied in unison.
The table came apart laughing, and under the cover of it Grace looked across at Reno with her cheeks still pink and her eyes bright, and mouthed babe? at him with her brows raised, and he mouthed back worth it, and she had to look down at her plate.
The pies came out after the table was cleared, and there were four of them.
“Apple,” Grace said, setting them down one at a time. “Peach. Cherry.”
Hank immediately cut himself roughly a quarter of the apple pie.
“And one more,” Grace said.
She opened the flat box she hadn’t let Reno carry, and slid out a pecan pie, and set it on table in front of him.
Reno looked at it.
It was a deep, dark, mahogany, the way it came out when somebody knew to pull it the exact minute the center stopped trembling.
The pecans were arranged in the tight spiral his grandmother had arranged them in because she said a pie was an excuse to make something beautiful with your hands, and the crust had the crimped edge she’d taught all of her daughters and daughters-in-law, and that none of them had ever managed to make look like hers.
The whole table went quiet. Even Lily.
“Where,” Reno said, and had to stop as his voice broke, and start over. “Where did you get that recipe?”
“I asked Tessa,” Grace said simply. “Tessa asked Dillon. Dillon asked your mother. And your mother emailed it to me. Then she called me and talked me through the secret part your grandmother never wrote down.”